Page 187 - Invited Paper Session (IPS) - Volume 2

IPS 208 Johan S. et al.
monitoring and evaluation in fields relating to agriculture, such as the EU's
common agricultural policy (CAP), sustainable development, and
environmental and food-related policies. Challenges in this area of statistics,
such as changes in world agriculture driven by globalisation and social change,
changes in the CAP and other EU policies, and technological progress and new
data sources, have made it necessary to modernise EU agricultural statistics in
order to keep providing high-quality, comparable and flexible data (European
Commission, 2017). The primary objectives of this ongoing modernisation are
to i) meet new and emerging data needs better, more flexibly and faster, ii)
improve the comparability and coherence of EU agricultural statistics, and iii)
reduce the costs and burdens which data collections place on producers and
providers.
The first step was to modify the system for the agricultural census. A new
regulation on farm-level structural statistics, Regulation (EU) 2018/1091 on
integrated farm statistics (IFS), provides the legal basis for the agricultural
census to be conducted in 2020 and two sample data collections to be held in
2023 and 2026. These data collections, which cover the widest range of farms,
will update information on the state, trends and impacts of the EU agricultural
population. They are thus an essential backbone for other agricultural statistics
and also fulfil international requirements and guidelines such as those of the
FAO, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the United
Nations Global Strategy to improve Agricultural and Rural Statistics; for
example, the standards, concepts and definitions used in the IFS were
designed in accordance with FAO recommendations for better international
comparability.

2. Methodology
European statistics are produced by Eurostat in cooperation with the EU
member states. The national statistical authorities collect, verify and analyse
national data and send them to Eurostat. Eurostat's role is to consolidate these
data and ensure they are comparable, using harmonised methodology. The
partnership between Eurostat and the national statistical authorities to
develop, produce and disseminate European statistics is called the European
Statistical System (ESS). In addition to the EU member states, the ESS
partnership includes the European Economic Area (EEA) and the European
Free Trade Association (EFTA) countries.
National statistical authorities, usually the national statistical institutes
(NSIs), collect the data for the 2020 agricultural census. Data collections are
based on a modular approach comprising:
 core structural information on the most important aspects: land,
livestock and the farmer, collected from farms exceeding common
physical thresholds. The thresholds were established based on

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